Dynamics of foams and liquid films
Isabelle Cantat is a professor at the University of Rennes, head of the Soft Matter Department and a specialist in the rheology of liquid foams and soap films at the Institute of Physics of Rennes. Her work is rewarded by a silver medal of CNRS which is given to researchers already recognized on the national and international level.
Combining theoretical and experimental approaches, Isabelle Cantat has been interested in the physics of liquid foams for 20 years. She seeks to answer a seemingly simple but crucial question: how to predict the life span of a foam and the way it flows? Her work focuses more broadly on free-surface hydrodynamic flows, on a small scale, in the presence of surfactants - in other words, drops, bubbles, soap films - and, on a larger scale, liquid foams. Because foams are everywhere - in cosmetics, in the food industry but also in industry and construction - the objective is to understand the fine mechanisms at the origin of their stability to improve their properties. As part of an ERC Consolidator Grant obtained in 2017 for her DISFILM project, Isabelle Cantat and her team have highlighted how liquid flows between bubbles when a foam is deformed, and understood the role of surfactants in this process.
The ceremony took place on the 14th of November 2023.
